How to Preview Sequences in Adobe Premiere

An Adobe sequence refers to the timeline in Adobe Premiere.
It's in this part of the program where clips from the bin are turned
into a fine tuned edited video. Clips are first brought into the source
monitor where they are roughly trimmed down. Then they are combined into
sequences. You then watch the sequence and trim down the clips even
more into a polished edit. After the edits are more or less finalized,
you can add effects to the clip.

Step 1: Previewing a Sequence

Previewing a sequence is easy. All you have to do is press the play
button in the program monitor. Or, you can click on the timeline and
then hit the 'spacebar' for the sequence to play back. Not all sequences
will play back smoothly. Some of them require Premiere to create a
preview file. As an editor, you need to see the smoothest play back
option possible in order to see the effects of your editing. Premiere
makes it easy for you to know if a preview file needs to be rendered
thanks to a color line in the sequence that appears above the video
clip.

Step 2: The Sequence Color System

There are three colors that appear above a video clip that will alert
you if a preview file needs to be rendered. Green means that the video
clip is fine and no rendering is required. Yellow is used for clips that
are not rendered. These clips probably do not need rendering for smooth
play back, but if you can spare the hard drive space, then it is a good
idea to render these clips just to be safe. Red indicates that the clip
needs to be rendered for play back.

Step 3: Rendering Clips

Rendering sequences is easy. The fastest way to do it is to hit the
'enter' button when the sequence is selected. This will render all the
clips in the work area that have a red bar above them. However, clips
with the yellow bar will not be rendered. Clips that are outside of the
work area will also not be rendered.

You can also render clips using the sequence section in the top menu
bar. 'Render Effects in Work Area' only renders the red clips while
'Render Entire Work Area' will render the red and yellow clips. 'Render
Audio' renders whatever audio files had effects applied to them and
there are also options to delete the rendered files for this project.
You would want to do this when there have been a lot of changes to the
sequences, because each preview files takes up space on the hard drive,
even if it is no longer needed.

When Does a Clip Need to Be Rendered?

Whenever a change is made to a clip with effects, no matter how
small, it needs to be rendered again. Because of this, you should be
very careful about where your scratch disk is set up because hard drive
space can quickly disappear.